>>I doubt that the old fdisk is capable of handling today's disk sizes. But as you said, a fresh bootable FreeBSD (or Knoppix or any Linux) distro disk has all the disk utilities you may want.
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>How do all these "other" operating systems work with MS? I don't mean running them at the same time, but you can use the utilities from things like Linux, FreeBDS, etc to do everything up to the point of intalling XP? I guess it kind of makes sense, as the things prior to intalling are not OS-dependent by their very nature. Is that it? I'm just a little wary of using these products and wondered what you thought.

It's just to wipe your disk. You can partition it, and later have anything installed. Though, if you want any of the Windowses installed with anything else, install oldest Windows first, newer Windows next, Linux/FreeBSD last. Because the Windows always screws the MBR and wants to own the boot loader. My XP overstepped the Vista's boot loader when I installed it (even though it was on a separate partition). Linux/BSD is a much better neighbor, it doesn't tread over anything unless you tell it to.